Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Allow GiST distance function to return merely a lower-bound.

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)iki(dot)fi> writes:
> Allow GiST distance function to return merely a lower-bound.

I wondered how come this patch did not touch nodeIndexonlyscan.c.

After some investigation, it seems the only reason that this patch even
appears to work is that none of the built-in or contrib opclasses support
both lossy ordering operators and GIST fetch functions. Otherwise we
would do an index-only scan and the executor would simply ignore the
recheck flag.

I doubt we can ship this in this state; even if the core code doesn't
exercise the problematic combination, surely third-party opclasses
will want to?

I thought about hacking the planner to not select index-only scans,
but there's no way for it to know whether the opclass might return
recheck = true at runtime. I think the only real fix is to actually
propagate all the changes in nodeIndexscan.c into nodeIndexonlyscan.c.
Testing it would be problematic without a suitable opclass, though :-(

A short-term hack might be to throw a "not implemented" error in
nodeIndexonlyscan.c if it sees the distance-recheck flag set.

regards, tom lane